Classic Tech Tips Archive

I've said it before and mentioned DBAN (Darik's Boot and Nuke) as my favorite tool for this, but Sunbeltblog is mentioning this and it's worth reminding you. When you replace a PC, you might keep the…

For those of you that can't be dropped into an application and "wing it" learning by doing, newsforge has announced some openoffice.org training videos that are now available for free download. So, i…

Let's see there are a couple more notes to pass along on Sony DRM rootkit news. This story could go on for some time, it's already had legs for about a week or more and just when things started to wi…

It looks as though Sony has decided to suspend pressing cds with the XCP copy protection software. Numerous sources are reporting on the "capitulation" of Sony on the matter. It seems as though this …

There is support building for the opendocument format, it seems. The format is designed to prevent document lockin to proprietary formats and the group promoting it would like to see it supported by …

Incidents.org is reporting that realplayer has issued a patch in response to two vulnerabilities discovered by eEye. The first involves a skin file which could be loaded through the browser without p…

This is, in fact something I've been getting ready to do an article on soon. I had a system that had very strange and random problems that I've visited and tried many of the typical fixes for, in fac…

We're inching yet closer to a new official release of the Mozilla Firefox browser. Yesterday was the 1st anniversary of the 1.0 release and today see's the release of the second Release Candidate for…

A bit of good news on the spyware front, the FTC has announced that it's frozen the assets of a spyware ring. Apparently they spread spyware through a network of sites and blogs that pushed ringtones…

Unfortunately a LOT of people that have bought Sony-BMG cds (or borrowed, whatever...) are going to have some headaches too. By stock in Tylenol or Aleve or something.... anyway... here's todays roun…

Just a note to mention that I've updated a page that I published a good while back. It's kind of a funny story. I skimmed through the logs and saw that someone got here on a search for how to create …

Two notes on the Windows vulnerability patched day before yesterday. There is a trojan in the wild exploiting it and Symantec's AV definition to detect such an exploit is a bit too paranoid and flags…

This one caught my eye as I've spent many long hours playing different variations on the old strategy board game Risk. It appears that using Google Maps, a group has managed to write an API that let'…

According to spreadfirefox.com, a year ago today was the release of Mozilla Firefox 1.0 Firefox was released prior to November 9th, 2004 in preview releases and early betas, but the official 1.0 came…

About a week ago, when I was in the midst of several crises, I had a Dell Inspiron 5150 left with me to look at. I had seen it once before to replace the keyboard (I remembered that it had a nice des…

Incidents.org is reporting scanning for phpbb include vulnerabilities through Google. Apparently there is an IRC botnet being "cultivated". They are scanning for versions of phpBB prior to 2.0.10, th…

It looks like a list of Sony Music titles with the recent onerous DRM "rootkit" is being gathered. The Sunbelt blog has links to several lists. The EFF has a list here, there are two others though ou…

It looks like Motorola is investing in a company that develops fuel cell technology for small devices. According to the article the cells provide... in the power range of milliwatts to 50 watts and e…

In an effort to educate more people on the value of open source software, there is the Looplist. The Looplist was highlighted in desktoplinux.com today. It's essentially a user-collaborated WIKI list…

It sounds as though the first Apple x86 based systems may show up as early as January of 2006. This means interesting things for those that write open source software. I've seen discussions that when…

Slashdot has an interesting story up about the background of the selection of Windows Defender. It seems that an Australian software developer had a product called Windows Defender which protected Wi…

Here's a quick fix for Windows 2000 and XP when using cleanmgr to clean out temporary files. I've run across many systems that it just freezes (or takes way too long) calculating space saved by compr…

Sunbeltblog has a story about the "VideoC" video player... apparently they discovered this when visiting a site. A video starts to play and then abruptly stops and claims that "VideoC" player needs t…

In doing a routine Google for my name... I ran across a website which has my email address and too many others to count in a plain text file. The site is configured to allow browsing of all files/fol…

That most wonderful day of the month has come when we get an idea of what vulnerabilities we may see exploited.... Seriously, if you run Windows, go to windowsupdate.microsoft.com or ensure you have …